Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 4).djvu/20

 Petersen's review is noteworthy, not for its own sake, but for the effect it produced on Ibsen. His letters to Björnson on the subject are the most vivid and spontaneous he ever wrote. Björnson happened to be in Copenhagen when Petersen's article appeared in Fœdrelandet, and Ibsen seems somehow to have blamed him for not preventing its appearance. "All I reproach you with," he says, "is inaction." But Petersen he accuses of lack of "loyalty," of "an intentional crime against truth and justice." "There is a lie involved in Clemens Petersen's article, not in what he says, but in what he refrains from saying. And he intentionally refrains from saying a great deal Tell me, now, is Peer Gynt himself not a personality, complete and individual? I know that he is. And the mother; is she not?" But the most memorable passage in this memorable letter is the following piece of splendid arrogance: "My book is poetry; and if it is not, then it will be. The conception of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall be made to conform to the book." It certainly seems that any definition of poetry which should be so framed as to exclude Peer Gynt must have something of what Petersen himself called "Tankesvindel" about it.

Ibsen's burst of indignation relieved his mind, and three weeks later we find him writing, half apologetically, of the "cargo of nonsense" he had "shipped off" to Björnson, immediately on reading Petersen's review. He even sends a friendly "greeting" to the offending critic. But this is his last (published) letter to Björnson for something like fifteen years. How far the reception of Peer Gynt may have contributed to the breach between them, I do not know. Björnson's own criticism of the poem, as we shall presently see, was very favourable.